LOS ANGELES — Andy Enfield tried to smile as he stood in a Galen Center tunnel after a recent practice and assessed the USC men’s basketball team’s recent slide.

“We knew we weren’t going undefeated,” Enfield said.

The Trojans, who suffered their first loss to seventh-ranked Texas A&M by 16 points on Thanksgiving weekend then stumbled at SMU by 17 points last Saturday, have dropped consecutive nonconference games for the first time in two years, their promising season hitting some early turbulence.

Shooting has gone cold. Backcourt depth has shriveled. And after debuting in the preseason top-10 for the first time in four decades, the Trojans fell to No. 25 in this week’s AP poll.

The formidable stretch continues Friday night at Staples Center, where USC (4-2) tips off against Oklahoma in the Hoophall L.A. tripleheader, a second-year showcase organized by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Like SMU, the Sooners (6-1) are among teams receiving votes just outside the top 25, and the Trojans will need to reverse their dry spell to keep up. Oklahoma plays at one of the fastest tempos in the nation and leans on Trae Young, a 6-foot-2 homegrown freshman point guard who leads the nation in scoring with 28.7 points per game.

“We’re going to try to cut the head off the snake and make other players become All-Stars,” Stewart said.

During their two-game losing streak, the Trojans have averaged 57 points per game on 34 percent shooting, their lowest scoring stretch since Enfield’s second season with the program in 2015.

Players cycled through a variety of reasons, though they found most of them unsatisfying. No one worried about shot selection.

“They just haven’t been going in,” forward Chimezie Metu said. “They’re shots we want. Some of them are wide open.”

Jordan McLaughlin, the Trojans’ senior point guard, reasoned playing at a quicker pace against Oklahoma might result in easier scoring opportunities in transition and at the rim.

“It usually helps us and gets us going,” McLaughlin said.

It might also help to have better depth behind McLaughlin at point guard, where the Trojans have become suddenly thin.

Duke transfer Derryck Thornton, who sat out the SMU game with a shoulder injury, will miss at least a few more weeks. De’Anthony Melton, who has been withheld from games this season as USC investigates his eligibility amid the FBI probe into college basketball, is likely to miss a seventh contest against the Sooners.

School officials interviewed Melton for a second time this week, according to his attorney Vicki Podberesky, but offered no timetable for when a decision on a potential return would be reached.

“We miss him,” Enfield said. “There’s no question.”

His absence is felt on both ends of the floor, each impacting scoring. Melton averaged nearly 2 steals per game last season, second most in the Pac-12 Conference, and that often led to easy points in transition. He averaged 3.5 assists per game and often helped McLaughlin initiate the offense in half-court sets. The Trojans had 17 turnovers at SMU.

Enfield compared the situation to last season, when forward Bennie Boatwright missed 15 games in December and January because of a knee sprain. The Trojans went 11-4 in that stretch. But unlike Boatwright’s knee injury, Melton’s saga has neither a timeframe, nor a clear end date.

For the first time, USC’s players signaled some public frustration with the investigation this past week.

“I need my boy back on the court. #FreeDman,” Nick Rakocevic wrote on Twitter last week.

Metu on Monday tweeted a photograph of a white t-shirt with “#FREEDMELT” written in black letters across the front.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to him,” Metu said. “He hasn’t really done anything wrong. We all feel like he should be playing. And hopefully, it gets sorted out pretty soon.”

McLaughlin called Melton’s absence “tough” and “frustrating.”

“Whenever one of your teammates is going through something, it kind of affects everybody,” Stewart said. “But we just got to try to focus on basketball right now.”

Arizona, which was also linked in the FBI investigation, has also started 6-3 and fallen out of the Top 25.

For USC, Oklahoma presents another test.

The Trojans, under Enfield, have never lost three nonconference games in a row.

Joey Kaufman is the USC beat writer for the Southern California News Group. Since joining the Orange County Register in 2015, he has also covered Major League Baseball and UCLA athletics. His work has been recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors and Football Writers Association of America. Kaufman grew up in beautiful downtown Burbank.

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